Being Halloween month, it’s the perfect time to consume entertainment with darker, more unconventional, and hopefully unforgettable, flavours. That description definitely applies to The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night, the first volume in a new graphic novel trilogy from Monstress creators Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. Book 1: She Eats the Night is out today, 11 October from Abrams ComicArts.

Now if you’re expecting The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night to be Monstress 2.0, check your expectations now. This is an entirely different beast. That said, look closer and you will find some thematic overlap, such as towering entities that have evidently stepped out of nightmare, powerful beings couched in unassuming human form, and complicated mother-daughter relationships. But whereas Monstress is its own special brand of East meets West high fantasy, with its own unique world-building, The Night Eaters is positioned a lot closer to home.

Best described as horror meets dark urban fantasy, with a dollop of thorny black humour, The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night is grounded in our recent-to-present reality. Chinese American twins Milly and Billy are struggling personally and professionally, with the COVID-19 restrictions having hurt their fledgling restaurant. The pair have had to turn to their parents, Ipo and Keon, immigrants from Hong Kong, for help, which heightens tensions in the family. Keon is nothing but cheerful, laid-back support. The problem, though, is Ipo, the ultimate, emotionally aloof Tiger Mom, who radiates disappointment in her children, and apparently loves her garden more than them.

Concerned that the twins are too “soft,” Ipo recruits them to clean the ramshackle house across the street, which was once the scene of a disturbing murder. The result is an evening of nasty surprises and jaw-dropping revelations for Milly and Billy, including that there’s much more to Ipo than her surliness.

The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night is enjoyably unpredictable, and improves with multiple reads. Once again Liu and Takeda have taken their Asian heritage, and infused their backgrounds with a story to create something fresh, but still accessible and relatable for all audiences. Takeda utilises a more “scrawly” style here than in Monstress, but it’s no less impactful. In fact, given the comic’s horrific content, the rawness feels more appropriate than the intricate elegance of her previous Eisner Award-winning work. In moments of peak emotion, Takeda even allows herself some Manga-esque over-exaggeration, which adds to the fun.

Liu’s writing is just as memorable. The dialogue is razor sharp – often laugh-out-loud funny – but it also injects a surprising amount of heart. She Eats the Night touches with tenderness on such topics as parental fears for their offspring, paralysing terror of the unknown, and how failure and self-loathing can become an amplifying spiral of bad decisions. These are explored through quiet conversations that slot in between the gory mayhem. There’s also a wonderfully tender dynamic between Ipo and Keon, which explains why this odd couple works so well, and makes them probably the most loveable parents in macabre comicdom (at least from a reader’s perspective) since Morticia and Gomez Addams.

She Eats the Night is just the start of the story, of course. A lot of questions are posed here, and a lot of doors opened, with the answers evidently still to arrive. Book 2 in The Night Eaters trilogy, Her Little Reapers is currently set for release during Fall 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere.

In the meantime, though, you can read the 208-page The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night right now. Find your purchase options, which include e-book, here.